there were more community pre-K programs going on when i was a kid, as far as i am aware. like that was a thing parents could take advantage of at no cost.

it wasn’t just 0 -> kindergarten. i did a year in pre-school where i learned the ABCs song and basic phonics.

from what i understand now, that shit hardly exists in most communities and if it does, it is not only not free, it’s expensive as hell, so it’s only for affluent parents.

class sizes are also bigger and as i’ve heard from career public school teachers, every class is all over the place in terms of abilities. so if you have 1-2 kids who need a ton of attention, it’s doable. but once you have more than 5, it’s a bust.

schools allocated funding towards teachers aids, but i wouldn’t be shocked if, like every thing else, that got offloaded decades ago onto competitive federal block grants which have all seen gutting this year.

so, you take all that, you take the socioeconomic context of the place, the fact that public school teaching has been reduced to precarious levels of pay for requiring extensive expensive education and professional licensing, and you deploy it all as a strategic, deliberate, multi-pronged approach to gutting universal free education as a social program for the working class and you’re going to see a catastrophe that compounds year over year regardless of whatever technology “these dang kids today” are using.

before it was phones, it was video games. before that TV, before that comics. kids with exhausted/inattentive parents stay up crazy late goofing around into some shit and are completely fucked during the school day with behavioral problems and they aren’t thriving in the classroom.

i love to shit on phones/screens and doomscrolling, but the bigger picture here is austerity, emiseration, and inequality at 100 year highs.

it takes a village to raise a child and the village is on fire.